Leobard's blog

The OrganiK project, where Gunnar Grimnes and I from DFKI are currently working on, is speeding up.

Last year we submitted a paper to the SCPE Journal of Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience Scientific International Journal for Parallel and Distributed Computing. They have a special issue on “The Web on the Move”. Our paper is called “A Sociotechnical Approach to Knowledge Management in the Era of Enterprise 2.0: the Case of OrganiK”, here is the abstract:

The increasing need of small knowledge-intensive companies for loosely-coupled collaboration and ad-hoc knowledge sharing has led to a strong requirement for an alternative approach to developing knowledge management systems. This paper proposes a framework for managing organisational knowledge that builds on a socio-technical perspective and considers people as well as technology as two highly interconnected components. We introduce a conceptualised system architecture that merges enterprise social software characteristics from the realm of Enterprise 2.0, and information processing techniques from the domain of Semantic Web technologies. In order to deliver a KM approach that could assist in reducing the socio-technical gap, we suggest deploying such a solution using an integrated sociotechnical implementation methodology.

• Bibtex is on bibsonomy
• download link

Tada! Yesterday I submitted my PhD to the University. If you remember, a little more than two years ago I started blogging about my PhD. The last step, the third one, was to write a PhD.

In the last year, the step was to have it reviewed by first supervisor, Andreas Dengel, and second supervisor, Mehdi Jazayeri. Their feedback was healthy for the PhD and challenging me to do some overnight work to include it. At the end, the PhD improved a lot and parts of it were rewritten, a new chapter added, others shortened.

After handing it in yesterday, it will ripen a bit by staying at the university, then the supervisors will review and comment on it, and finally an appointment for the defense will be planned. That will hopefully be before summer, but can also be in autumn this year.

I feel a bit reliefed to finally have it finished writing, and I am happy to get this item from my todo list. It leaves me a few days of joy, until the remaining tasks of nepomuk kick back, work on the OrganiK project kicks in, my work for OSCAF ontologies has to be continued, and our Semantic Desktop Spinn-Off company also starts spinning…

as Linus from the peanuts put it: “That’s the secret to life… replace one worry with another….”

My ISWC Talk about long-term Semantic Desktop evaluation is available for online viewing:

Evaluating long-term use of the Gnowsis Semantic Desktop for PIM

I still have to improve and get rid of the many “ah”s and “uhm”s.

Paper at Springer

Germany is funding the major project THESEUS to work on the internet of the future, many things are Semantic Web and Web 3.0.

I just stumbled upon a video about the TEXT use case, a sub-part of the project.

watch:
http://www.sap-tv.com/video.php?a=3261&l=1

Part of the video is also Stefan Wess, CEO of Empolis, with whom we cooperate in Eclipse SMILA (smila is the semantic indexing part of Theseus where aperture is used, thats how I stumbled to the video).

When the Technology Review Article appeared today morning, the pipes were already heating up and it was dugg and twined. We already bet that we will be slashdotted and Gunnar wrote a small reminder that “nepomuk may kill MacOs” on the download page.

and, this minute Michael Sintek noted that we were slashdotted:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F16%2F1546219&from=rss

“Technology Review has a story looking at Nepomuk — the semantic tool that is bundled with the latest version of KDE. It seems that some Semantic Web researchers believe the tool will prove a breakthrough for semantic technology. By encouraging people to add semantic meta-data to the information stored on their machines they hope it could succeed where other semantic tools have failed.”

Horray, the first slashdotting that I experience on something where I contributed. May more come.

Technology Review wrote a short article about NEPOMUK:

Semantic Sense for the Desktop A project brings Semantic Web technology to personal documents.

“This might be the semantic desktop that actually survives,” says Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks, the company behind Twine, a semantic bookmarking and social-networking service. “There’s a lot of potential to build on what they’ve done.”

The idea of a semantic desktop is not new. The Open Source Applications Foundation and SRI, two nonprofit organizations, have both worked on similar projects. But previous efforts have suffered from the difficulty of generating good semantic information: for semantic software to be useful, semantic information needs to be generated and tagged to files and documents. But without useful applications in the first place, it is hard to persuade users to generate and tag this data themselves.

Nepomuk is distinguished by a more practical vision, says Ansgar Bernardi, deputy head of knowledge management research at DFKI. The software adds a lot of semantic information automatically and encourages users to add more by making annotated data more useful. It also provides an easy way to share tagged information with others.

wow. I failed to resize a bloody 3D diagram in excel, and googling for “excel 3d line axis length” added another distraction from my PhD,
behold the power of Excel’s 3d gaming engine.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php?print=1

“Integration of computer games and spreadsheets has tightened during the evolution of computer technology.

At an early stage this integration among the the games and spreadsheets was comical, e.g. they were installed on the same hard disk, or the purchased games were listed in an Excel sheet. Later the integration has tightened, as some games introduced a built-in spreadsheet (accessible by the “boss key” feature) – or Excel contained some built-in 3D games as Easter Eggs.

Now we have arrived at the next step of this integration, as Excel’s cutting-edge 3D functionality is not hidden in Easter Eggs anymore but can be accessible publicly and easily. Excel has grown up and started its conquest as a revolutionary 3D game engine.”

—

Tom Heath recently wrote about RDF Browsers in the IEEE Internet Computing Journal.

It’s at the level of “things” that browsers for the Web of data should operate. Providing simple browsers for RDF triples, and the documents in which they’re published, is one option for enabling people to interact with this information space. We saw this trend with some of the earliest Semantic Web browsers, but it rather misses the point. The one-page-at-a-time style of browsing, which we know well from the Web of documents, would make nothing of the potential we now have for integrated views of data assembled from numerous locations.

Right, I agree.
The core class in OWL and PIMO is called Thing for a reason.
Also this reminds me of our user interface abstractions used on the semantic desktop:

Which we published in Leo Sauermann, Ansgar Bernardi, Andreas Dengel: Overview and Outlook on the Semantic Desktop. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on The Semantic Desktop at the ISWC 2005 Conference. http:// CEUR-WS.org/Vol-175/.